Francisco Webber offers a critical overview of current approaches to artificial intelligence using "brute force" (aka big data machine learning) as well as a practical demonstration of Semantic Folding, an alternative approach based on computational principles found in the human neocortex. Inspired by the ground-breaking work of Jeff Hawkins from Numenta, Cortical.io has developed the Semantic Folding Engine which is based on a statistics-free processing model that uses similarity as a foundation for intelligence. Semantic Folding is not just a research prototype; it is a production-grade enterprise technology.